Radio Pieces

spam poetry

We’re all too familiar with junk mail that offers to enlarge body parts or reduce mortgages. Most of us delete these messages right away, but Mallory Kasdan finds unexpected art in her pile of unsolicited emails.

encyclopedia of an ordinary life

How do you chronicle a typical life in the 21st century? Do you blog? Rap? Â One man show — it? Author Amy Krouse Rosenthal decided to alphabatize and categorize her life in a series of everyday observations.

Her memoir is called Encyclopedia of and Ordinary Life, and it even has a theme song!Check out the book’s website.

(8:03)

Ethan Lipton

If Andy Kaufman wrote jazz standards and Norah Jones sang them, they might sound like the tunes of love, loss and hostility that come from post-modern crooner Ethan Lipton. With utter sincerity in his lemon-drop voice, Ethan sings about going to work, about breaking up with all his friends, about Peeping Toms and deli salads.

He asks age-old questions such as “Why do lovers take taxis? ” and of Whitney Houston, “What did you do to that sweet, sweet Bobby Brown?”

landfill artist

In 1969, artist and struggling young mother, Mierle Laderman Ukeles decided that the repetitive tasks of taking care of children and a household were art.

Her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” asked presciently, “when the revolution is over, who’s going to pick up the garbage? Ukeles has spent her career trying to answer that question, beginning in the late 70’s when she set out to shake the hand of every single New York City Sanitation worker — all 8500 of them.

church of craft

Also aired on December 22, 2002 on The Night Air, ABC Radio National Australia.

The Church of Craft involves a group of spiritually minded creative people who have formed their own church devoted to acts of crafting and making. There are currently chapters of the church in NYC, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where people gather together to share crafting techniques and creative inspiration.

get your wig on

short version (5:36)Produced for: PRI/WNYC’s Studio 360Airdate: February 9, 2002
long version (20:38)Produced for: Radio Eye, ABC Radio National, AustraliaAirdate: January 6, 2002

Get Your Wig On is my first audio documentary, which I wrote and produced in 2001 to enter in the Third Coast International Audio Festival (www.thirdcoastfestival.org).

It deals with an artist’s idea about how one constant, in this case, a huge brown curly wig, can be interpreted and visually expressed by an assortment of strangers.

The piece was aired in its longer form on Radio Eye on Australia’s ABC Radio National. I then edited it down to to a shorter version for air on PRI/WNYC’s Studio 360 (www.studio360.org), where it aired February 9, 2002 and again on August 3, 2002 as a show closer to, “Opium, Rave, Styron.”